Hi everyone, I was wondering if anyone knows the difference between the link:www.sitename.com google search and the link:<space>www.sitename.com. They both show back links to the website used in sitename but with the space you get many many many more links shown. Google's search commands say not to use the link. I was wondering what the difference is? My theory is that the link:www.sitename.com shows the links google is using to rank your website and the link:<space>www.sitename.com show's all sites linking to yours. I haven't been able to collaberate that though. If anyone has any information on the differences or know's where I can go to figure it out I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you very very much!
I'll have a stab at this. When you do the search with the space, it is like doing a normal search for the two words "link" and "yourdomain" google just ignores the : (colon) Just try it in google and you will see.
Hi Freespace, Thanks for taking the time to answer I appreciate the help. So if you put the space between link: and the website and you get all those thousands of results becuse google is just searching for "link" and "www.sitename.com". Do you know if those are counted as backlinks to your website since those sites do have a link going to www.sitename.com? The reason I'm confused is because when I do a link:<space>www.sitename.com I see alot of pages with links pointing to www.sitename.com yet on the link:www.sitename.com none of those websites are showing up. Is there any way to know which one google is using to determin page rank or just backlinks to your site. If it's helpful I have an example I can post just let me know. And again thanks so much I really appreciate all the help I can get. ^^
Searching for www.sitename.com ( or link:<space>www.sitename.com) is searching for www.sitename.com as a TEXT not as LINKS. So you get the pages that have the words www.sitename.com whether they are linking to you or not. For example, if the site is linking to you using another anchor text (like "Best Site" or "Click Here" for example) it won't show in the results and if a site is using the words www.sitename.com but not as a link, it will show in results so this method is not accurate at all to show the links. I think you got the idea now. Google link: does not show all the links, try looking in Google Web Master tools (not showing all either but a lot more than link or try in yahoo: linkdomain:www.sitename.com